Ingredients

The Elbex ECX97-9 PTZ camera

weatherproof enclosure

The camera sittting in the enclosure

Raspbery Pi as controller

USB to RS422 converter

EasyCap frame grabber

This grabber comes in multiple flavors, the one I received is based on the USBTV007. I was not able to get this to work on the RPi, hence this item is replaced by a IP-based video grabber, with the manual at this link.

IP Video 9100A

This required a firmware update to yoics firmware, as described in this thread. Not everything was correct, the installed web interface had no way to upload new firmware (as indicated in the thread). http://<cam.ip.add.ress>/System.htm had the necessary controls and allowed the upload to start. However no progress was indicated. After about an hour or more I disconnected the device (fully expecting that it was going to be bricked), and --big surprise-- the new yoics firmware was installed. A detailed listing of camera comands is at this link.

Ethernet usb pigtail

powered USB hub

stepdown converter to supply power for Raspi and USB devices

24V power supply for the camera and the 5V converter

Hardware build

after drilling the hole for the camera dome

overall schematics

After it became clear that the RPi has trouble with USB video capture (not enough USB bandwidth), the re-design now uses a BNC to IP converter. The RPi will proxy the created MJPEG stream to a common web interface.

is supposed to get a mjpeg stream. However, the current proxy settings of lighttp swallow that URL (somehow disable the .cgi extension?) Correction: Works on FF (Chrome only supports mjpeg in a <img> tag)

It turns out that the shitty USB support of the RPi - well known by now - puts a dent into the project: After a few move commands, the RPi just freezes and needs a power-cycle reboot. Looks as even for the simplest tasks, the RPi isn't of much use. There are rumors in some of the forums that FreeBSD as well as ArchLinux may behave a tad better. FreeBSD is what I'll try next.

Automated daily reboot

The cam tends to hang every three or so days, and I have been unable to find out why. All the indications point towards the IP Cam server, but even the RPi stops responding after a few days to ping. As a stop gap measure, a automated daily restart needs to be implemented, which can be started via the FreeBSD cron daemon. In order to also reboot the video server, the following command was found in the html source of its web interface: